Rpg Maker - for japanese/console style rpgs. Shamefully, I don't know anything about this software or its community, but looking at the games list at http://rpgmaker.net/ and multiplying games per page by pages gives a game count of close to three and a half thousand. Wow.

Bioware's Neverwinter Nights. Last I heard, ign shut down the main site where nwn content was hosted. Survivors of this cataclysm established a new site at http://neverwintervault.org/. It looks like they have over 3000 game modules, and I don't know if they saved them all from the ign site.

What troubles me is not that the community around nwn largely faded, but that nothing really seems to have replaced it. Moddable rpgs in recent times have all been single player, no? Please someone tell me I'm wrong.

Minecraft - it's been years since I've played it, and of course it's not a prototypical rpg, but it does have a huge user base and mod community.

Unity3d - A general purpose game development system. I know ProphetSword is developing an rpg with it, maybe he can tell us more about the state of the community.

What am I missing here guys? Are there huge communities of fan made worlds for MMORPGs?

Other modern options:Bethesda Games - Lots of mods for Skyrim, Fallout 3, Oblivion, etc. Many of them add story content or whole quest lines, and I've seen whole worlds rebuilt in some of them. Not all mods are great content.

Shadowrun - These games have a toolset. Don't know what the community is like, though. I own the first one.

Divinity: Original Sin - Another game with a toolset. Haven't messed with it either. No idea if people are currently producing mods for it.

Other modern options:Bethesda Games - Lots of mods for Skyrim, Fallout 3, Oblivion, etc. Many of them add story content or whole quest lines, and I've seen whole worlds rebuilt in some of them. Not all mods are great content.

Good call - I should've thought of TES! Yet most the mods are about adding new weapons/items and other things to the existing game, not whole new adventures using the existing engine. Are we living in the dark ages of the small time crpg author? I'm still not sure.

The Legend of Grimrock series! A modern Dungeonmaster clone with integrated map editor, and a powerful Lua [script] interface, that includes support for drawing on the screen —to make GUI changes.Any object in the game can be altered, and defining new objects is possible; (including custom animated props and monsters via community tools). Even the monster AI is exposed and changeable [LoG2].

*I spent a year making a dungeon for Grimrock(1), along with 22 other modders. We each made separate area of the map; but a few of us then optimized and bug tested the whole thing. Either Grimrock title lets you have a working dungeon in a matter of minutes (albeit a simple one); that you can fully explore in first person. Complex ones are common in the community.

Good call - I should've thought of TES! Yet most the mods are about adding new weapons/items and other things to the existing game, not whole new adventures using the existing engine. Are we living in the dark ages of the small time crpg author? I'm still not sure.

"Open source reimplementation of the morrowind engine." There are developers there who are making it multi-player, and this is supposed to become a game making engine (so, not just for playing morrowind) when the 'great de-hardcoding' is done

"Open source reimplementation of the morrowind engine." There are developers there who are making it multi-player, and this is supposed to become a game making engine (so, not just for playing morrowind) when the 'great de-hardcoding' is done

ST

Thanks ST - I'd read about the project a few years - good to see they're still progressing. And multiplayer morrowind would certainly be something (although I think Bethesda's beaten them to it with an MMORPG)

Shadowrun - These games have a toolset. Don't know what the community is like, though. I own the first one.

Did you like the first one? I own all three, and can attest [IMO] that the first was great, and that each game after was better than its predecessor.

I liked Returns/Dead Man's Switch, and I loved Dragonfall. Haven't completed Hong Kong yet, so I can't say whether it's able to surpass Dragonfall. The Matrix gameplay is better in HK for the most part, not sure about the rest though.

But it doesn't seem like it's really caught on as an epic RPG creation system. There are a few custom modules, but not many. I think the developers also kind of sabotaged their own vision of a bigger mod community by not ensuring compatibility between the three different versions of the engine.

Fight the Dragon does have a small but quite active modding community. As an RPG it's pretty lightweight, the gameplay can get repetitive after a while, and the options in modding are limited. You can't add new graphics, for one, or do any really complicated stuff. But the better maps show lots of creativity, and there is a huge amount of them already. After UA and NWN, this is my third go-to game and community. They sometimes do community projects, too, like an Avent Calendar (one map, one creator per day) or themed challenges.

And there's Blades of Avernum by Spiderweb Software, which allows you to create your own adventures. I haven't tried the editor myself, and it doesn't seem to have a real community to speak of, but there are a couple of custom campaigns available for it.

Driftmoon comes with a creation kit as well, but it failed to draw a bigger and prolific community to it, just like Divinity: OS and Dragon Age: Origins, apparantly.

I used the original Freedom Force to create character models for a couple of my SHUA mods, Major Mystery Serial--"Chapter 1: To Smell a Rat" (Mj-M-1.zip) & the more recent Man-Storm (Manstorm.zip), but I never joined the Freedom Force community. FRUAdom is my home.